I was recently interviewed by Marketing Magazine's Kristin Laird for the publication's "Very Necessary Twitter Guide". As it was an email interview, I was able to lean on my colleagues Marty Yaskowich and Nik Badminton for their thoughts. The Q+A is below but you can read the full and final version here: The Very Necessary Twitter Guide | Marketing Magazine The usual caveats about disclosure apply _ there are plenty of client and client competitive examples here. -- Question: Is Twitter more than a reactive tool (dealing with consumer complaints)? Answer: I see Twitter as a channel rather than a tool _ it can be bent to whatever use brands want. Because of the immediacy of twitter, it does tend to see a lot of knee jerk reactions and content from consumers. Organisations have to make a decision how they want to deal with these reactions or if they want to lead the conversation around their brand. Twitter is also a tool to gain better visibility on online search. Bing and Twitter have recently resigned their partnership and indicated that more collaborative approaches to search by combining the two will be coming. Q: Can Twitter be used as a brand building tool? Why or why not? And how? A: The way the platform has been built and used, it lends itself to personal branding and as a result, brands with defined personalities (ex @BlackBerry), personalities behind the brand (ex @Zappos) or personalities within campaigns (my personal favourites are @TheKevinButler for Playstation or @SaltysLife for Knorr) have been the most successful, from a "branding" perspective. I'm unaware of a brand that has been built purely on twitterƒbut that doesn't mean it hasn't, can't or won't be done. Q: What Canadian brands are using Twitter right? Can you give a specific example? A: Without knowing the strategy behind the execution, it's hard to say. That said I think @McD_Canada has done a fantastic job, and has received deserved kudos, of continuing to engage its user base at scale. I'm not being obsequious when I say that that @marketing_mag has done a phenomenal job of really speaking to a niche audience while providing valuable content. Q: Who should manage a brand's Twitter account _ third party community managers, agency partners, or in-house communications/marketing team? And why? A: The answer that no-one likes is that it depends. It depends on the brand, the in-house resources, the agency and its competencies. Budget comes in here as well _ to do twitter right can take considerable resources. Speaking from an agency perspective, some of our clients want to take this in-house and use us as strategic resources, while others ask us to take on everything from strategy to content creation to engagement with consumersƒwithin certain pre-agreed parameters and supported by the necessary response protocols and escalation procedures. Q: What are the common mistakes brands make on Twitter? - Looking at twitter as a broadcast channel, being selfish and only sharing its own content - Not having a clearly defined vision of where twitter fits within the overall marketing activity _ the platform doesn't help this though. The measurement tools for those using the basic account are very weak so it is easy to flounder with no clear direction or measures of success beyond followers, clicks and "engagement". But for our clients participating in the beta, we have been able to tightly focus on a particular demographic/mindset/interest and show how our followers are the right followers and we're not just collecting followers for its own sake. - Not providing the platform with the correct funding either in terms of time or media (see above) - Seeing Twitter as a standalone as opposed to being a component of the overall Paid, Owned and Earned media ecosystem. It does not stand alone and still needs to be planned in alignment with marketing activities such as the digital strategy, PR, web-site updates and other social media outreach activities such as Facebook or blogging etc Q: Do consumers expect too much from a brand's Twitter feed? They expect an answer too quickly, or that any problem can be solved by complaining about the brand openly. A: There are a lot of myths and misconceptions around using twitter for customer service that marketers hear and can be easily seduced by. I strongly believe that brands using twitter to facilitate customer service has encouraged consumers to "shout" for help, rather than using formal customer service channels. In her book, "Open Leadership", Charlene Li looks at the famous Twelpforce case study, from Best Buy, but what most people don't realise about this case is that the business problem was identified first, then came the solution and twitter just happened to be the facilitation channel. The "idea" was never to use twitter as a customer service tool, it was to use the latent time of the thousands of best buy employees to better serve their customers and answer questions or solve problems. For a pitch, my team looked at the consumer sentiment of a well-known brand that uses twitter for customer service. We saw that the volume of conversation around the brand had increased since they started this initiative, but so had the negative sentiment _ this brand had trained its customers to shout about any negative issues. Q: Give three tips on how to manage a corporate Twitter account. 1. Know your objectives and strategy _ and more importantly how they fit in with the business objectives and culture. If it's appropriate, give your employees permission to engage on Twitter without constraining them too heavily. They are your people, they epitomise your brand and can be your greatest salespeople 2. Know your audience _ and, more importantly what content they want to see. Hint: it's not just your content 3. To paraphrase the British army adage: no plan survives contact with the consumer

There's no shortage of people trying to predict the future. In fact, there are 19,333 pages of results on SlideShare for the term "trends." While this column also predicts the future, it does so by analyzing the present _ if we want to know where we're going, we need a realistic idea of where we are now. In the spirit of this issue's focus on youth, I'm saying that is exactly where we need to look. Working with clients such as Teletoon in Toronto, BC Dairy in Vancouver and McDonald's via Kid Think, we at DDB Canada have plenty of opportunity to research and learn from Canadian youth. The biggest change we've seen falls into the following buckets: entering the post-social world; Facebook as a utility; pervasive use of mobile; and, lastly, avoidance of online advertising. Post-social Russell Davies in the U.K. coined the phrase "post digital" about two years ago, and the current youth population is now well into the second generation of digital natives. And while social media was fresh six years ago, if you're 17 or 18, you've only known an adolescence with social media. As my friend Eric Weaver (@weave) says, "Google gave us search, social gave us sharing and we ain't giving either back." This generation's entire online lives have been based on collaboration, the ability to publish and share, and they'll bring the ethos of social media into the work force and into their lives as mature consumers. Brands need to reconsider how they're built to serve the consumer. Today's (and tomorrow's) consumer doesn't want to wait until you have a heavy-up media buy. They have questions for you right now. 24/7/365. Post-social indeed. Facebook as a utility We know, anecdotally, that "youth" are on Facebook, what we didn't know is how much. According to a mash-up we did of Facebook's ad-targeting data and the 2010 census, 117% of Canadian youth aged 15-19 have a Facebook account. (The statistical anomaly is likely due to out-of-date census data, kids lying about their age and duplicate accounts.) Facebook is the new lunch hall, the new camp fire, the new common room for everyone, but especially for the social natives. For brands, it means online ecosystems need to change. The dot-com still plays an important role in validating consumer decisions but the real magic is happening on Facebook, where sharing and recommendations happen more than one billion times a day. If you have an online strategy, you need a Facebook strategy. Failing that, you need a "startegy." Twitter? Not so much. Pervasive use of mobile If youth aren't on Facebook, they're on their mobiles. BBM, SMS, playing games, downloading apps and, of course, checking Facebook. About one-third of those on Facebook access it through mobile devices. For marketers it means we can get closer to the point of purchase and apply influence in times and, thanks to geo-location based services like Foursquare, locations that really add value to the bottom line _ either through intercepting a consumer on their way to a competitor or incenting a visit through a deal. While every year is slated to be the one mobile "breaks through," there are few great examples of brands doing things well _ Pizza Hut's excellent branded app and Axa Insurance's fantastic iAd being two standouts for me. Avoidance of online advertising While this generation shares too much (pictures of underage partying, ill-advised poses and even cyberbullying), they are highly savvy and skeptical online. It's becoming increasingly difficult to attract traffic through display advertising. The new currency is sharing and recommendation, which means marketers must get smarter with the content we create. Just 6% of 12- to 17-year-olds and 12% of 18- to 24-year-olds, according to a recent Forester study, want an engaged relationship with your brand. Highly entertaining branded content is the name of this new game _ in order to break through, your marketing must have share value. In order to develop share value, we need to take advantage of all new and evolving technologies and opportunities (see how effective advertising on Twitter was for Virgin America) while realizing that each piece of marketing needs to stand out not only in its category but against every other advertiser. When youth are avoiding your paid online media, you need to earn your media through outstanding (literally, standout) content like P&G did for Old Spice, BMW did with The Hire and Johnnie Walker did with "The man who walked around the world." So what? In this post-social, Facebook-as-utility, increasingly mobile world in which consumers are avoiding advertising, marketers need to do two main things: Up our game. Every campaign is a Super Bowl campaign in that we need to get people talking about the content and the brand. Rethink the process. We must reinvent ourselves in a mirror of the consumer who doesn't see any distinction between "marketing," "customer service," "supply chain" or even, heaven forbid, "human relations." Ed Lee is director, social media at Tribal DDB Toronto. Find him online at EdLee.ca or @edlee on Twitter.

Today, I was asked to present to the American Marketing Association's Toronto chapter on Overcoming Social Media Obstacles in Financial Services. With a title like that, my focus was on helping the marketers in the room convince their executives to fund and resource the social media plan - what will make executives say "no" and how can you integrate executives into the planning phase to ensure the necessary funding? This presentation was really tuned into the process of getting a plan approved, not the components of a social media plan which meant I had to presume everyone in the room had an awesome socially creative plan or campaign that they wanted to execute. In the Q&A, most of the discussion focused on working with specific internal stakeholders, compliance and legal being the main two marketers had concerns with. My response was simple - bring these influencers into the process early on and work through any potential or perceived issues with them at the table. A robust scenario planning exercise will also enable internal groups to become more comfortable with this emerging channel. Interestingly enough, while I was at the podium, Frank Eliason, Citigroup's social media lead was telling an audience that "using regulatory concerns as an excuse to not embrace social media is a "crutch". Click here to view the presentation.